Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (51 page)

The gunshots at the parish house triggered the massacre in the church. The soldiers began by using their hatchets to bludgeon the worshippers to death—so as not to alert the village, some of the villagers I interviewed said. Others said it was to save bullets. When Patrice emerged from the bushes the next day, he found most of the victims with crushed skulls. The three nuns were lying in the convent with their underwear around their ankles; he suspected they had been raped. One of them was still breathing when he found her, but she died before they could get her to the local health center. In the parish, he found the priest dead, face down on the floor in his white robes. As he walked around, he heard the voice of the plumber from his hiding place in the ceiling: “ I’m up here! They shot me in my buttocks, but I’m still alive!”

Another group of soldiers had gone to the chief ’s residence. They were furious, the villagers said, that he had lied to them about the security situation and that they had been ambushed twice. They also thought that the Mai-Mai, who recruited along ethnic lines, were inherently linked to the customary chief. Chief Naluindi’s whole extended family had sought refuge in his house, thinking that they would be safe there. “ In our tradition, the
mwami
[chief ] is sacred,” the chorus outside Patrice’s house lamented. “You don’t kill the
mwami
during the war. Killing him is like killing all of us.”

At least fourteen people were in the chief ’s house when the soldiers arrived. The rebels killed all of them. Villagers who had run into the bushes came back the next morning and found the chief ’s pregnant wife eviscerated, her dead fetus on the ground next to her. The infants of the chief’s younger brother had been beaten to death against the brick walls of the house.

The way the victims were killed said as much as the number of dead; they displayed a macabre fascination with human anatomy. The survivors said the chief’s heart had been cut out and his wife’s genitals were gone. The soldiers had taken them. It wasn’t enough to kill their victims; they disfigured and played with the bodies. They disemboweled one woman by cutting her open between her anus and vagina, then propped up the dead body on all fours and left her with her buttocks facing upwards. Another corpse was given two slits on either side of his belly, where his hands were inserted. “
Anavaa koti
—they made him look like he was wearing a suit,” the villagers told me. Another man had his mouth slit open to his ears, was put in a chair and had a cigarette dangling from his lips when he was found. The killers wanted to show the villagers that this would be the consequence of any resistance. There were no limits to their revenge—they would kill the priests, rape the nuns, rip babies from their mothers’ wombs, and twist the corpses into origami figures.

“We had seen people killed before,” Patrice told me. “But this was worse than killing. It was like they killed them, and then killed them again. And again.”

Around twenty miles further north on the road to Bukavu lay the town of Kilungutwe. It was situated on the banks of one of the many tributaries that flow into the Congo River far to the west and was known as the gateway to the jungle from the highlands to the northeast. On the day of Nyakiliba’s ambush in Kasika, several dozen traders from Bukavu arrived at Kilungutwe for the large market that was held there every Monday. Michel,
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a thirty-nine-year-old trader from Bukavu, was on a truck that had dropped them off a few miles before the market. There had been an accident, he was told by the Congolese soldiers there. No trucks were allowed down the road. Anxious to get to the market to sell the salt, sugar, soap, and clothes he had brought, Michel took off on foot down the road, along with around sixty other traders.

When they arrived in Kilungutwe, they noticed something strange. The streets were almost deserted, and a large number of Rwandan soldiers were milling about. A bunch of Congolese soldiers passing in a truck waved at them furtively to go back in the direction they had come from, but they didn’t understand. “We thought it had just been an accident,” Michel remembered.
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As they passed over a large bridge made out of tree trunks, a group of four Tutsi soldiers hissed at them.

“Hey! You! Put down those bags!” The soldiers were tall and lanky and had long knives in their belts. They separated the locals from the Bukavu traders. To the group of around ten locals they said, “Ah! So it is your children who have been killing us!” The locals protested that they didn’t know what they were talking about, but the soldiers began beating them anyway.

It was only later that Michel found out that the rebels who had been ambushed in Kasika had radioed ahead and told their advance party to stop wherever they were and to “clean up.” The soldiers herded the traders and the locals into a small house below the road, a sturdy cement structure about twenty feet by forty feet, with blue wooden doors and windows and a corrugated iron roof. The sixty people stood packed like sardines in the small house. The sun went down, leaving the room in darkness except for some cracks in the window, through which they could see a fire that the soldiers had lit outside. It was hot and humid, and the air was filled with the sound of muttering and breathing. Several people prayed out loud. A baby’s cry turned into a persistent wail, until finally her mother began sobbing and said that her baby was about to suffocate.

“We called the soldiers outside and asked them to have pity on the newborn,” Michel told me.

Without asking any questions and as if on cue, the soldiers let the woman out. Suddenly, the prisoners heard screams coming from outside, first from both mother and child, then just from the child, then silence. Michel was not near a window, but someone who was whispered, his voice wavering. “ Knives. They are using knives,” he said. “ They grabbed her hands and feet and slit her throat,” another said. All of a sudden, the room was full of people crying and praying to God in French, Swahili, and whatever other language came to their lips.

Michel was in the back of the room, where he was crushed against a wall as the others tried to get as far as possible from the door, through which the soldiers came and grabbed people one by one. “ This is for our brothers that you killed,” they heard the soldiers tell their victims outside. The screams were silenced as the throats were slit and the next person was dragged out of the house. It took what seemed to Michel to be an eternity to empty the room. As the people thinned out, he was able to get a better look at his surroundings in the half-light. He saw that one of the thin ceiling boards was loose. He hastily climbed up and bumped into several other people lying in the small space between the ceiling and the roof. It was even hotter and danker here, and he could feel the bodies of his neighbors trembling with fear. He was close to fainting and felt like vomiting.

After a while, the screams faded below them and they could hear soldiers shuffling around and the sound of bodies being moved outside. Someone was counting, then a voice in Kinyarwanda said:

“How many did we put in the house? Did you count?”

“Yes, there were at least sixty.”

“Are you sure? Where did the rest of them go?”

“I’ll check again.”

Feet began to scrape the floor below them and then someone poked the ceiling boards.

“
We!
You up there! How many are there?” Michel’s neighbors’ trembling increased until he was afraid they would begin to rattle the ceiling boards. “I can hear you up there! How many are you?”

After poking for a while, the soldier went outside. They hear the men muttering with each other, and then several came back into the room. Suddenly, an iron spear tip burst through a ceiling board not far from where Michel was lying. The boards were made out of flimsy plywood and the spear pierced it easily. The next jab hit Michel’s neighbor in the leg, who cried out.

“Come down now, or we will get our guns! Just tell us how many you are, and then come down!”

Several more spear jabs came through the roof. Three of Michel’s fellow prisoners climbed down from the hideout. Michel turned to a woman who was lying next to him.

“We must pray now,” he told her. “ We are going to die.” She started crying.

I met Michel many years later in Bukavu through a minister in his church. Michel—he wanted me to use a fake name to protect his identity—fidgeted while he sat in my living room in Bukavu and spoke in bursts. When I asked him how he had survived, he said I would not believe him and was then silent for several minutes, twisting his boney hands and looking at the ceiling.

“When I looked to my side, I saw a woman in white lying next to me,” he finally said. “ I hadn’t seen her before, and I thought it was strange that she was wearing all white. I turned to the woman lying on my other side, who was sobbing, and asked her, ‘Do you see her? The woman in white?’ It was very strange to see a woman dressed all in white. It was very dusty then; it was the dry season. White clothes were maybe things you wear to church or to a baptism. And she seemed—she seemed to be
glowing
. My neighbor shook her head and continued sobbing. Then the woman in white said—her voice didn’t seem to be coming from her mouth, but from inside my head—she said, ‘Stand up! Stand up now!’ And I gathered my strength and just stood up. The roof was very low—you couldn’t even kneel there—but as I stood up, a sheet of roofing came undone from its bolts, and I could see the night sky. There was no moon that night, I remember. I stood up and slid down the roof. ‘Someone’s getting away!’ one of the soldiers cried out, and they opened fire. I could hear the bullets whistling by me and going into the ceiling where I had been lying with the others. But I wasn’t hurt. I jumped down from the roof and began running into the bush that surrounded the house. My legs were moving on their own.” Michel looked at me. “That angel saved me. God saved me.”

He told me that he ran through the palm trees and the cassava fields that surrounded the village as shots rang out behind him. He kept on running until he found the hut of a relative of his on a hill several miles away. Together, they watched the village burn in the valley below them.

The next morning, they watched the columns of soldiers departing toward Bukavu. When they were gone, Michel and his relatives went down into town, where ashes and smoke still filled the air. They found a mound of bodies smoldering next to the house where he had been held prisoner. The corpses had been doused in gasoline and set on fire. They had been reduced to a tarry mess of charred skin, bones, glasses, and belt buckles. They found dozens of other bodies strewn across town, in houses, on the street, and in ditches beside the road. In some cases, the corpses had been stuffed down pit latrines. The found the charred remains of one body in an oil drum used to brew palm oil.

Over the next several days, the survivors buried hundreds of bodies. The better known among them—the chief, the priest, the nuns, an evangelical minister, a local administrator—were given their own grave. Others were dumped in anonymous mass graves by the roadside, where the soil was soft and deep. Still others were left to decompose in the latrines, water tanks, and septic pits where their killers had thrown them. Neighbors buried their neighbors, mothers and fathers buried their children, and ministers buried their church members. They were in a rush; they didn’t know when the rebels would be back through town. They had to bury their dead and then leave. People I spoke with said they had counted 704 people they had buried themselves; a United Nations investigation conducted years later concluded that there had been over 1,000 victims.
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